Academic Biography
Dave Murray-Rust is a postdoc with the the Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications, in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He obtained an MEng in Electrical and Information Systems from Cambridge, an MSc in Informatics from Edinburgh and PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Music from Edinburgh. His work centres around computational systems that model and interact with humans, including modelling of music as a communicative process, tangible and multitouch interfaces and models of human actions on landscapes and their impacts on ecosystems. In addition, he improvises electronic music and carries out interactive artistic projects.
Current Academic Work
I'm currently working in The Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. I'm working on the SociaM project. Grant Description:
SOCIAM - Social Machines - will research into pioneering methods of supporting purposeful human interaction on the World Wide Web, of the kind exemplified by phenomena such as Wikipedia and Galaxy Zoo. These collaborations are empowering, as communities identify and solve their own problems, harnessing their commitment, local knowledge and embedded skills, without having to rely on remote experts or governments. Such interaction is characterised by a new kind of emergent, collective problem solving, in which we see (i) problems solved by very large scale human participation via the Web, (ii) access to, or the ability to generate, large amounts of relevant data using open data standards, (iii) confidence in the quality of the data and (iv) intuitive interfaces.
Land Use Modelling
From 2008 until 2013 I worked at the Centre for the study of Environmental Change and Sustainability, in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh. I worked on agent based models of land use change: starting from socioeconimic data, creating models of human behaviour which respond to changing climate, sociopolitical and economic changes, and using scenario analysis to develop plausible futures based on coherent assumptions.
Agent Based Modelling [edit]
I developed three agent based modelling frameworks, and an introductory course:
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Introductory Agent Based Modelling Course This is a series of exercises created for the Spatial Modelling of Human Environment Interactions course. It goes from a simple Cellular Automata model, to a city growing with different agents types and social networks. |
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EuroABM EuroABM models competition for land at a European scale, based on agents ability to leverage a range of capitals to provide services to the general population. (Part of VOLANTE) |
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Aporia Aporia is an Agent Based Modelling framework for simulating rural land use change. It models the impacts of human behaviour and socio-economic scenarios on ecosystem services, and has been applied to several case studies around Europe, and connected to an Individual Based model of skylark populations. (Part of EcoChange) |
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ABMLand ABMLand2 is an agent based model created as part of the PLUREL project. It is desgned to model urban growth though simulating interactions between Residents, Planners, Developers, Infrstructure Providers and Lobbying organisations. (Part of PLUREL) |
Other Work [edit]
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GEnS The Global Environmental Stratification by Marc Metzger divides the world into 125 bioclimatic strata. I've been involved in modelling how these might shift based on future climate scenarios, by applying machine learning techniques to current data and classifying future points. |
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PLUM Plum is the "Parsimonious Land Use Model". It uses a system dynamics approach to simulate global land use change, using as few components as possible. |
- Vision development
- Crowdsourcing
Projects [edit]
I was involved in:
- EcoChange: an FP-6 project assessing the impact of global change on biodiversity and ecosystems.
- PLUREL: an FP-7 project around sustainable urban-rural land use strategies.
- VOLANTE: an FP-7 project providing an interdisciplinary scientific basis to inform land use and natural resource management policies and decision-making and developing a roadmap for future land resource management in Europe.